


‘til the water rises

by ghost_teeth



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, M/M, MerMay, wildly unsexy tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27068299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/pseuds/ghost_teeth
Summary: A summer storm is coming, and there’s a monster in the lake.
Relationships: Hank Anderson/Connor
Comments: 8
Kudos: 50





	‘til the water rises

**Author's Note:**

> my contribution to “Deep,” the MerMay 2020 anthology. with much appreciation for DyingNoises/DyingNoyses’ hard work as the organizer. <3

Used to be, you’d see them hauled out onto breakwaters or floating just below the surface of the water as they recharged in the sun. It’s rarer now, but you’ll still catch little flashes of them, sometimes—worm-pale flickers in dark water, there and gone like phosphenes. 

More often, it’s just bits of them washed up on the shore or caught on the spindly legs of docks. 

This one almost looks pristine, all pearly and perfect, face-down among the duckweed. But when Hank nudges it onto its back with the toe of his waders, it’s clear why it’s washed up here: the middle of it has been hollowed out like a jack-o-lantern, its abdominal cavity nothing more than a neat blue bowl and little silvery winks of severed wire. The face is intact, which is uncommon for strandings like this, but the eyes are gone. Hank rolls his neck to listen to it pop, goes _fuck me_ a few times, then stoops to take the thing by the wrists and drag it away. 

It’s barely June, barely noon, but it’s already 85 and climbing. Hank’s eyebrows are dripping sweat and his hands keep slipping and squeaking on the thing’s slick-soft rubber flesh. It’s unfairly heavy, like hauling half a car up the rocky bluff. The thing’s gotta be fifteen feet long, and by the time Hank reaches the top of the bluff, the finger-thin tail-tip is still eeling among the pebbles on the shore below. 

Hank keeps his eyes fixed on his own knees. He can’t look at the hands curling loose against his forearms, the soft white face tipped back at a nasty angle. It was indecent of them, Hank’s always thought, to make things that look like this only to put them to work fixing pipelines and eliminating invasive fish. He emits a few more _fuck me_ s, just to soothe himself. 

He hauls the thing up past the stilted house on its precarious overlook, past the treeline and to the junk pile tucked politely behind a copse of pines. He didn’t start this junk pile—it might’ve been home’s previous owner, or the one before—but he’s happily added to it since he took possession of the shitty little lakehouse. It’s a sinister tangle of car parts, rusted-out corpses of outboard motors, moldering tarps, all presided over by a regal old refrigerator. Over the years, it’s also accumulated more than one disembodied arm trailing wires, a few sections of tail. 

He dumps the thing next to a shattered motorboat hull, then walks back to collect the tip of its tail and wind it in like the cord of a vacuum cleaner. A slant of sunlight glitters off the bare dome of its head, and Hank promptly tosses several scraps of tarp over it. He doesn’t need to see that every time he comes back here.

Feeling he’s put in a solid day’s work, Hank retreats into the house, where a single window air conditioning unit wheezes feebly. He meant to take the little boat out, do some fishing. He meant to do that yesterday, and the day before. Something always seems to get in the way.

He props the refrigerator door open and drags a chair over to sit inside it, dripping sweat onto the linoleum below and still wearing his waders. He opens his first beer of the day and leans back to stare out the window at the water below. 

For just an instant, something seems to trouble the surface of the lake, far from shore but not far enough. 

* * *

Hank’s last beer of the night pulls him outside, down the bluff and onto the groaning little dock. It’s late, or early, and he stands with the tips of his toes hanging off the ragged edge of the wood and over water gone black and silver in the dark. Tonight, his little slice of Lake Michigan is opaque and uncommonly still, and Hank half dreams he could walk on the surface of it, were he to take a step forward. Somewhere out on the lake, some kind of bird is hooting, maybe one of those weird seasonal ducks Hank never knows the name of. It’s a lonesome, expectant sound, a question with no answer.

It’s one of those nights that has Hank thinking about swimming. He thinks of skinny arms stuck through bright orange floaties, turkey sandwiches in a blue cooler, half a limp worm on a hook, a small pale face bobbing almost close enough but too far (always too far). 

The beer in Hank’s hand is more than half empty. He winds up like a pitcher and chucks the bottle into the lake. It hits the water with a satisfying splash and floats there on the surface. Hank smiles and hopes it’s the last little bit of pollution that finally decimates the entire ecosystem. He hopes it’s the bite that the lake chokes on and dies. 

For a moment, the bottle spins lazily, then it’s suddenly upright, standing at attention like a little soldier. And then it’s gone. Silvery ripples mark the place where it disappeared, and even those are gone in seconds. 

* * *

Hank doesn’t remember passing out on the dock, but he supposes he ought to be grateful that he didn’t roll into the water and drown in his sleep. 

His cheek is pressed into the rotting wood and there’s a hand lying on the dock in front of his face. It takes him a moment to realize that it isn’t his hand, and that it isn’t attached to anything at all. 

“ _Fuck!_ ” he hisses, scrambling to sit up. 

The hand has been detached at the wrist, and a glittering tangle of wires spills out from it and dangles into the water below. For the life of him, Hank can’t figure out how it got up onto the dock, unless it somehow crawled up there on its own. The idea nauseates him—can bits of those things continue to function independent of the main body?

He scrubs his palms across his belly and shakes his head hard enough that he’s pretty sure he can hear his brain rattling around in the cage of his skull. The idea of picking up the sad limp hand is somehow far worse than dragging the entire body up the bluff yesterday. It’s too delicate, too pretty. Hank looks around helplessly, half hoping someone competent and more lucid might show up and offer to take care of it for him.

There are eyes on the water. Somehow, this is the least startling thing that has happened to him this morning. 

The eyes are dark, and the head—half-submerged and perfectly still—is bone-white. Hank barely has time to think _Christ, not another one_ before the eyes blink twice in rapid succession. 

“This yours?” Hank hears himself croak. He doesn’t know if these things speak, or even understand speech, but he’s pointing stupidly down at the hand anyway. 

The pale thing in the water blinks again, and then, slowly, two white hands emerge on either side of its face, palms out as if it’s surrendering. The fingers are far too long, tapering at the ends to gleaming points—nothing like the hand on the dock. The fingers wriggle a bit, and there’s a terrible and alien sort of humor in it, as the thing means to say, _Both hands accounted for, thanks._

With that, the monster slips below the surface, and for the barest second the water roils wildly as if disturbed by multitudes of tangled boneless things, the sort of under-evolved animals you might find writhing on whale bones in dark deep places. Then, all at once, the monster is gone entirely, and the water, milky with silt, laps gently at the dock. 

There’s nothing for Hank to do but pick up the hand left behind and run it up to the junk pile, then shut himself up in the house with a six-pack.

* * *

(There was a search, of course, after that stray current dragged his boy away. There were boats on the water, finned unreal things below. The men in the boats told him _sorry,_ over and over _._ The white swimming things said nothing at all, but one of them brought him the deflated husk of an orange float.)

* * *

For the next two days, the sky is bruised and bloated with rain that refuses to fall. The air is thick and electric, and Hank sits on the dock for hours each day and waits for the storm.

On the second morning, there’s a scrap of white tailfin waiting for him on the dock, fresh and still dribbling blue onto the wood. 

The third morning brings two eyes—blue, round and perfect like marbles—and the storm, and the monster.

It’s one of those slow storms, the kind that comes on like a headache and promises to stay for a day or more. There’s something patient about the thunder, and the raindrops are fat and cold. Hank still sits on the dock, and, a stone’s throw away in the lake, the monster sits with him. It’s still mostly submerged, just dark eyes above the rain-pocked lake, although every so often something long and pale lazily teases the surface of the water. It watches him, barely blinking, never coming closer.

Hank nudges one of the glassy eyes on the dock with his bare toe, and it spins crazily. He looks up and catches the monster’s eye. “You keep leavin’ this shit here?” he calls.

The monster seems to hesitate, then, slowly, the rest of its face surfaces—a nose, a mouth, a chin, moon-white and gleaming, and the way its lips twist into a smile is terrifyingly human. 

“Hello,” it says. The voice is even and ordinary and there are so, so many teeth.

Maybe it’s the unreality of the storm or the morning Manhattan he fixed himself, but Hank is calm, steadier than he’s been in a long time. “Are you what’s wrecking ‘em? The water droids?” He nods down at the scraps at his feet.

“Yes,” says the monster. Its smile is bland and sweet.

“Why?”

The monster tips its head and licks its lips with a gray tongue. There’s no reason for it to do something like that, to ponder like a person might. “It’s my purpose,” it says finally.

“So what are these for? Why leave ‘em here?” The thunder nearly drowns out the last part of Hank’s question. The storm is coming into its own.

The monster’s smile widens, and its teeth glitter like scalpels. “For you,” it says.

Lightning spiders across the sky then, and Hank doesn’t know when the monster slipped back beneath the water.

* * *

Hank sits on the floor of his narrow shower for two hours that night, using up all the hot water in an effort to scrub his bones clean of the frigid rain. All the while he thinks of blue eyes, spinning sad circles on a rotten dock, staring out of an unsmiling face as a cold hand presses an orange float into his hand. 

Not for the first time, he longs for the dog that used to be his, long ago surrendered to a good woman who no longer knows how to love him. It would be nice to have something to touch tonight, something to ground him.

* * *

The storm quiets down, but the rain marches on through the next day. Hank brings the big golf umbrella down to the dock and waits for the monster.

When the monster comes, it brings him a tangle of shining silver wire, depositing it gently in front of Hank’s bare feet. It clutches the edge of the dock with its long, long fingers and smiles up at him like a painting of the Virgin Mary. 

Hank finally takes in the monster in its entirety—hairless head, delicate shoulders, a smooth torso that diverges at its end into innumerable twisting tendrils, so long that Hank can’t discern where they end. Its flesh is pearlescent, colorless, and its eyes are large and coffee-dark. There are seams at its joints, barely-there, and if Hank looks closely, it seems as though the little hairline spaces are lit by some inner bluish glow. 

“You’re like the rest of ‘em,” Hank says. “A water droid.”

One of the monster’s tentacles, the thickness of a man’s arm, twines itself lazily around the pilings of the dock. “Yes,” the monster says. “And no. I think you’ll find I’m different from the others.” Its voice is husky, matter-of-fact, more youth minister than lake monster.

“Yeah, you destroy other droids.” Hank stoops to pick up the wire. It’s warm. He pockets it.

“I eliminate malfunctioning units,” the monster says smoothly. The tendril wrapped around the pilings has started to creep forward along the planks of the dock. The very tip of it is spaghetti-thin, and it just barely brushes the tip of Hank’s big toe before withdrawing. 

“Yeah? How many of ‘em are malfunctioning?”

“All of them,” says the monster. 

* * *

For two days, the rains keep coming, and the waterline creeps up over the dock and climbs the stilts securing the house to the bluff. Hank stands on the muddy slope and tells the monster his name.

“I know,” says the monster. “I looked up your boat’s registration.” It pauses. It’s sprawled in shallows that were once solid ground, stirring the muddy water gently with its multitudes of pale tentacles. It adds, “I’ve never seen you use the boat.”

Hank bends to roll his jeans up further, up past his calves. “Guess I hate the water,” he says. 

“You’re afraid?” 

“Not afraid of it,” Hank corrects. “Hate it.”

The monster didn’t bring him anything today, no gruesome little trophies. It seems hesitant today, indecisive, cagey, as if torn between disappearing back into the lake and scrambling up the bank as fast as its many limbs can drag it.

Hank gets down low, puts his face near the monster’s face (with all its teeth) and says, “I want to drain the lake and piss on the dry bed left behind. I want to make it a desert. I want to fill it with crude oil and watch all the fish die.”

The monster draws back, just by a hair’s breadth. “Why?” Its eyes tick back and forth, as if trying to read something written across Hank’s forehead.

“Because I hate it,” Hank says. “And it doesn’t have the fucking decency to hate me back.”

* * *

The water climbs to the very bottom step of the back porch by the next night, and Hank asks the monster its name.

“I’ve been designated RK-800,” says the monster. It’s hauled its torso half out of the water, and its long, long fingers are tapping rhythmically on the stairs. Its tentacles festoon the railings like ghostly party streamers.

“That ain’t a name,” Hank scoffs.

“No,” the monster agrees. “I guess it isn’t.”

Hank sips his beer and stares out across the swollen lake. It looks infected, he thinks, like a boil that needs lancing. “Are there just no more droids left out there or something?” he asks. “Like, are you out of a job, or what?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

Hank waves an arm expansively at the lake. “Haven’t seen any bit of ‘em floating around here lately. And you just spend all your time creeping around here like some kind of fucked up raccoon, so I just assumed.”

A tentacle has twined itself around Hank’s bare calf, loose enough that he could easily pull away, tight enough to indicate intention. The monster twists its neck in something close to a shrug. “No,” it says. “There are still malfunctioning droids out there.”

Hank hums, sips his beer again. “So, uh, like what do they _do?_ They out there wrecking boats or something?”

“No. They aren’t destructive,” says the monster. It seems to turn the thought over in its head. “They’re purposeless. Aimless. They wander, regardless of programmed purpose.”

“Like ghost ships,” Hank says, without knowing what he really means by that.

“If you say so.”

Hank reaches down to run one finger along the tentacle wrapped around his leg, curiously. It’s so smooth it feels like nothing. “So how come you ain’t out there playing Little Mermaid grim reaper?” he asks.

The monster—RK-800—looks up at him for a long moment. The tentacle slips from Hank’s leg. “I don’t have an adequate answer,” it says.

* * *

The first of the house’s stilts breaks in the night with a noise like distant applause. 

By the time Hank is lucid enough to scramble to the back door, half the back porch has broken free and slid down the muddy embankment into the water below. Far away, Hank can see the shape of his little boat, torn from its mooring. 

He turns to flee into the house, to go for the front door and higher ground, but the house emits a tortured groan and jettisons the remainder of the back porch, and Hank pitches down the bluff with it. He only catches his descent in bits and fragments, like snatches of song on a busted radio, and it ends abruptly in breathless cold. 

The water is black and there’s no way up. There’s barely enough left of Hank to realize he’s drowning. It’s loud and too quiet. He thinks of Cole. He thinks of orange.

He breaks the surface with a gasp that burns and freezes all at once. He’s being held, squeezed too tight like a lemon in a juicer. There’s a pale face bobbing in front of him, and for one cruel moment he thinks that finally the lake has given back what it took from him until it resolves into something hairless and alien and wild-eyed.

“Hank,” the monster is saying, over and over. “Hank, Hank, Hank.”

Hank says something back, maybe words, maybe not. His arms are half numb but he lifts one up and lets his hand land heavily on the crown of the monster’s head. Somewhere beneath its strange skin, the monster is warm. 

“Hank,” the monster says again. 

Hank pats the top of the monster’s head with fingers gone stiff with cold. “You need a name,” he slurs.

The monster’s tentacles are wrapped around Hank’s middle, his legs, his arms, gently around his neck. But its hands, its long terrible hands with their gleaming talons, are on Hank’s cheeks, clutching his face like maybe he’s something unbelievable, like maybe the water gifted it something precious.


End file.
